2023-24

This course is an overview-style introduction to the Telugu language, including grammar, phonology, and the social, political, and historical contexts of the language and its users. Telugu, the majority language of the two southern Indian states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, is within the top twenty most spoken languages in the world. The global Telugu-speaking diaspora, too, is growing quickly in population and in relevance, especially in the United States. This course primarily aims to give students an introduction to the structure of the language, through learning the script, learning to recognize verbal and nominal morphology, and understanding the role of word order in a Telugu sentence. Students will also learn to use this knowledge as a way to answer questions such as: How is language tied to social categories such as ethnicity, class, caste, and geographical origin? How can the phonetic, morphological, and syntactic features of a language be taken up as markers of identity and as symbols in discourse? 

TR 3:30 - 4:50

What happens when people who speak different languages live in the same area? How do languages change as a result of their environment and social structure? How do social situations lead to language change and multilingualism? This course will engage with the literature on contact linguistics and multilingualism providing theoretical backgrounds and foundations for analyzing real-world situations. This course will apply the theoretical understandings to several instances of contact linguistics and a variety of complex social situations via case studies. We will briefly cover topics and process such as: bi/multilingualism, translanguaging, dialect leveling, mixed-Languages, pidgins & creoles, and language shift, all through a lens that addresses the complex situations they exist in with respect to cultural contact and colonialism. This brief overview of each of these processes will give students a basis for understanding and recognizing them in real-world contexts as well as providing them with the tools to ask critical questions about the situations and results.   

TR 12:30 - 1:50

This class examines the history and methodology behind the creation of constructed languages or "conlangs". We will explore how and why languages are constructed, critically assess the design of existing conlangs (e.g. Klingon, Esperanto), and discuss conlanging both as an art form and as a tool to study the properties of natural human language, connecting this to the field of linguistic typology. Throughout the course, students will each build their own conlang, combining knowledge across various linguistic subfields to produce a workable grammar. They will explore the patterns seen in natural languages, developing a deeper understanding of how phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics interact and applying this towards language construction.

TR 2:00 - 3:20

How do languages get into contact? How long do they stay in contact? What is contact-induced language change, and which are the mechanisms that govern it? What do arachnophobia, myalgia, geology, heterophagy mean?
In this course we will study language contact and its outcomes, as well as the social and linguistic factors that regulate contact-induced changes. We will examine a wide range of language contact phenomena from both general linguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives, and survey current approaches to all of the major types of contact-induced change (e.g. borrowing). Having Greek (but also other languages) as an example, we will consider linguistic and social aspects of the contact context as well as look into how the particular language has shaped the savant vocabulary of science, philosophy, arts, etc.

More precisely, we will offer a brief overview of the history of the Greek language with special emphasis on the Greek vocabulary that Greek language landed or borrowed at different stages of its history as a result of its linguistic contact with other nations and languages. We will start with the Pre-Hellenic phase of Greek and then we focus in Proto-Hellenic, Ancient Greek, Koine, Medieval Greek and finally Modern Greek.

TR 11:00 -12:20

MW  1:30 - 2:50

TR 2:00 - 3:20

TR 9:30 - 10:50

In this course we will examine the language of deception and humor from a variety of perspectives: historical, developmental, neurological, and cross-cultural and in a variety of contexts: fiction, advertising, politics, courtship, and everyday conversation. We will focus on the (linguistic) knowledge and skills that underlie the use of humor and deception and on what sorts of things they are used to communicate.

MW 1:30 - 2:50

This course is designed to review critically some of the literature on the phylogenetic emergence of Language, in order to determine which questions have been central to the subject matter, which ones have recurred the most, and to what extent the answers to these are now better informed. The class will also review new questions such as the following: What is the probable time of the emergence of modern language(s)? Should we speak of the emergence of Language or of languages, in the plural? What does the choice of the singular or plural delimitation of language entail for accounts of the emergence of typological diversity? How do debates on the emergence of language(s) bear on the nature and significance of Universal Grammar (aka the language organ or the biological endowment for language, among other names)? Is there any real conflict between arguing that languages are cultural artifacts and supporting the position that humans are biologically endowed to develop or learn them? What ecological factors explain the fact that human populations are primarily speaking rather than signing? Assuming that languages are communicative tools or technology, are there any strong reasons for expecting the architectures of signed and spoken languages to be identical? To what extent does modality bear on the architecture of signed and spoken languages? Can these questions be addressed independent of what the ecology of the phylogenetic emergence of language(s) is? Etc.

MW 3:00 - 4:20

Why is the plural of child in English children and not *childs? Why is undoable ambiguous ((i) 'unable to be done', (ii) 'able to be undone'), while unkillable isn't (only 'unable to be killed')? Unhappier is intuitively composed of several, smaller pieces: un-, happy, and -er; but what about unkempt? These questions are the purview of MORPHOLOGY, the field of linguistics devoted to studying the internal structure of words and how they are formed. Consequently, in this course we will investigate the nature of morphemes, in all their cross-linguistic shapes and guises. Key concepts which will frame our discussion include inflection, syncretism, allomorphy, and blocking. The only prerequisite for this course is LING 20001: Introduction to Linguistics.

TR 11:00 – 12:20 pm